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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news

Michigan Tech study suggests outfitting military infrastructure with solar PV microgrid systems – study found that the military requires 17 gigawatts (GW) of PV to fortify domestic bases and that the systems are technically feasible and economically favorable – also interesting directly from the research paper – the DOD operates over 400 military bases within continental USA. 27 of these bases already have or are planning solar power installations. Now, instead of talking about the geopolitical risks of protecting oil or arguing about pollution/climate change – solar is now defined as a strategically important distributed energy resource for the military.

1000 km range thanks to a new battery concept – Individual battery cells are not strung separately side-by-side in small sections; instead, they are stacked directly one above the other across a large area – the idea is to put the batteries together in a way eliminate much of the housing and contacting that can take up more than 50 percent of the space. One thing I’ve learned in the past year being a part of electrek.co is that battery density has many ways to improve that don’t need recreating of fundamental physics, but instead – packaging.